Revision summary
Frazer moved from magic as coercion, to religion as petition, to science as law, with sympathetic magic and survivals. Critique him for armchair method, unilinear stages, intellectualism and colonial ranking. Magic, religion and science coexist. The usable fragment is like-produces-like and contact. Modernity is incomplete disenchantment: civil religion, revival movements and political religion. A smartphone pilgrimage is not a fossil stage. Durkheim and Weber are better guides to religion as social fact and meaning.
Model answer
Introduction
- Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough offered a grand evolution of the human mind: from magic to religion to science. It was armchair, unilinear and too clean. Later theories of religion had to step around that staircase. The second part of the question is whether religion ended when the staircase reached modernity.
Body
Frazer’s evolutionism
Frazer treated magic as mistaken natural science. By the law of similarity, like produces like. By the law of contact, things once together remain linked. The magician tries to coerce nature. When coercion fails, humans petition personal powers. That is religion. When petition is found wanting, science explains impersonal law. Folk custom survives as a fossil of earlier stages. Comparison was global and ripped from context: a rite in Rome and a rite in a colonial ethnography became one type.
This is intellectualist evolutionism. Belief systems are ranked as proto-theories of nature, by how much they err.
Critique
- Armchair method: Frazer compared library notes, not living economies. Malinowski’s Trobriand magic in fishing and gardening is practical and social. That already wounds Frazer.
- Unilinear stages: Magic, religion and science coexist in every living society, including laboratories with lucky charms. Stages are a Victorian ranking, not a field sequence.
- Too cognitive: Ritual does social work that an error-theory of belief cannot see. Émile Durkheim’s collective effervescence and Turner’s ritual process are the usual counters. E. E. Evans-Pritchard on Azande witchcraft also showed that “irrational” belief can be logically organised in daily life.
- Colonial frame: “Savages” as the childhood of Europe. Later anthropology refused that timeline.
- What survives: The catalogue of sympathetic magic still teaches. The staircase does not.
Religion in modernity
Modernity did not empty the world. Max Weber’s disenchantment was a tendency, not a completed eviction. Secularisation in parts of Europe coexisted with public religion elsewhere, with nationalism as civil religion, with Pentecostal and other revival growth, and with science and piety in the same persons.
- Place: Religion remains a source of identity, ethics, protest and consolation. It also remains a field of power, including gender and majoritarianism.
- Not survivals: A smartphone pilgrimage, online darshan during COVID-19 lockdowns, or a televised Kumbh is not a Frazerian fossil of magic. It is a contemporary institution and a media form.
- Indian household: Clinical medicine and a vow at a shrine often sit in the same family. That coexistence undercuts Frazer’s staircase more cleanly than a sermon about secularism.
- Elucidation: Modernity pluralises the religious field — privatised belief, marketised devotion, political religion — rather than replacing it with Frazer’s science.
- Durkheim and Weber help the modernity argument more than Frazer himself: religion as social fact and as meaning under rationalisation.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD F[Frazer] --> M[Magic] M --> R[Religion] R --> S[Science] F --> X[Critique: armchair, unilinear] MOD[Modernity] --> P[Religion reorganised not erased]
Conclusion
Frazer gave a memorable unilinear career of the mind and a weak ethnography of ritual. Religion in modernity is not the middle step before science. It is a reorganised public and private power. Sympathetic magic remains his usable fragment; the staircase does not.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Multispecies, Multi-sited and Critical Ethnography.
Next question in the 2025 paper (Q5). View answer →
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What must be remembered from The Golden Bough?
The three-stage scheme, sympathetic magic, survivals, and the main lines of critique. The dying-god plot is not required in detail.
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What is a modern religion example?
Civil religion around the nation-state, or clinical medicine coexisting with vow-and-temple practice in the same household. Both undercut Frazer’s staircase.
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